In the early-morning hours of April 19, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a highly unusual order.
Released at 12:56 a.m., it covered only half a page; it was unsigned; and it dealt a blow to the Trump administration, which had claimed the authority to deport alleged gang members to a prison in El Salvador. “The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees,” the majority wrote, “until further order of this Court.”
Two of the justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, dissented from the ruling, but the order noted only that a statement from Alito was “to follow.” The Supreme Court almost never publishes anything before dissenting justices have finished drafting their thoughts. But this case, the seven-justice majority agreed, demanded extraordinary relief.
Notably, all three of Trump’s own appointees to the court — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — sided with the majority. Or, in other words, against him.
The “only explanation,” conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan wrote on X, was that the court “does not trust the Trump administration to abide by its promise” to a lower court. Donald Trump himself quickly responded in a flurry. “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” he posted on Truth Social. He called it a “bad and dangerous day for America,” arguing that the ruling had effectively allowed “the worst murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and even those who are mentally insane” to commit horrific crimes.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take anything Trump posts on social media. He posts often, and furiously, and his statements rarely reflect careful legal reasoning. By now, even his most ardent supporters know better than to take each post at face value.
And yet, the episode did point at something deeper: the latest turf war in a simmering feud between Trump and the courts. It also laid bare another conflict that’s received far less attention but may be just as consequential — the uncertain future of the most powerful legal organization in America.
For the past 40-plus years, the Federalist Society has shaped the conservative legal movement, which has been made ascendant by Trump’s nominees at every level of the judiciary. Most notably the Supreme Court, where five of the nine sitting justices are known Federalist Society members, including Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, each of whom was cultivated and recommended to Trump by members of the Federalist Society (the society itself doesn’t endorse candidates for the bench).
Yet, since Trump took office for his second term, the Federalist Society has fallen from his favor. Aides close to the president have said Trump plans to “look beyond the garden-variety Federalist Society choices” for judicial nominations and in May the president posted to Truth Social his dismay with the organization.
“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” he said. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!” He went on to bash one of the leaders of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, who had guided his judicial selections in his first term.
“I was new to Washington, and it was suggested that I use the Federalist Society as a recommending source on judges,” the president wrote. “I did so, openly and freely, but then realized that they were under the thumb of a real ‘sleazebag’ named Leonard Leo, a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America, and obviously has his own separate ambitions.”
This generational shift may define the society’s future. For FedSoc’s founders, success meant reining in judicial activism. But for the next generation, it may mean something more ambitious.
That’s a stunning reversal. The Federalist Society has been a singular lynchpin in the conservative legal movement’s success. Its partnership with Trump during his first term offered both sides a symbiosis: The society could achieve the legal victories once thought nearly impossible (Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned without it), while Trump could take political credit. But now, that partnership may be fraying. To some Republicans, the society has become little more than a polite debating club — too cautious, too institutionalist, too wedded to procedural limits that feel outdated.
At the height of its power and influence, the Federalist Society — or FedSoc, to many of its members — finds itself at an unexpected crossroads, and the questions facing it go beyond the president or our current political moment. Among younger members, especially those in law school chapters that remain the society’s lifeblood, there’s a sense that the old fights — Roe, originalism, judicial representation — are battles fought and won, and that the new battlegrounds now lie in culture-shaping institutions like media, entertainment and academia.
The question facing the Federalist Society, then, is about both its past and its future. Can it remain true to its original mission — a commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning — or must it evolve along with the Republican Party and become something bolder?
A new legal movement
Conservative legal thought didn’t exist in the organized way it does today back in 1982. Many young conservatives felt ostracized in the nation’s law schools. But they found allies in a handful of professors at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago, and that April, 43 years ago, they organized a meeting at Yale between them and other right-of-center officials in the Ronald Reagan administration.
Over three days in New Haven, speakers addressed a litany of concerns that sound familiar in 2025: Leftist media. Coastal elites. Courts that consistently ruled against conservative causes.
They also explored a then-emerging theory of judicial interpretation that would soon reshape the Supreme Court. “I sense that we are at one of those points in history where the pendulum may be beginning to swing in another direction,” Ted Olson, who served under both Reagan and George W. Bush, told the gathering. That energy was rejuvenating, many organizers and attendees remembered.
The conference itself, according to “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” a 2008 book by Johns Hopkins political science professor Steven Teles, was “intellectually ambitious but organizationally modest.” The organizers were not trying to start an institution, but rather a movement to combat a “legal profession … dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology.” The conference would provide “an occasion for … a response to begin to be articulated.”
The conference did that and then some. The Federalist Society was soon blooming at law schools nationwide.
Since the beginning, the group has welcomed many factions of conservatives, from libertarians to neocons. Those factions find some unity in a stated belief that the Constitution should be interpreted through an “originalist” framework, which usually means trying to understand what the words on the page meant to the public at the time they were ratified, or “original meaning.”
How are those determinations made, given that most of the Constitution was written hundreds of years ago and the public that ratified it is long dead? That’s where legal scholarship comes in. And that’s where debates erupt, because the original meaning isn’t always clear. And because to critics, the approach provides convenient cover for judicial interpretations that support conservative policies.
The Federalist Society has been a singular lynchpin in the conservative legal movement’s success. Its partnership with Trump during his first term offered both sides a symbiosis.
The Federalist Society does not officially advocate for or against any policies, liberal or conservative. If it has a position on anything, it is that the courts should state what the law says, and not what a given judge believes or wishes or hopes it ought to be. The society does not file briefs, nor participate in litigation. It does not advocate so much as it facilitates.
The society’s early leaders chose, Teles writes, to act as “intellectual and network entrepreneurs” whose goal was to “deepen the character of legal thought in conservative circles.” By hosting debates at college campuses across the country — and, later, through professional chapters — the society could effectively recruit like-minded law students and professionals; expose them and the legal establishment to conservative legal ideas; and sharpen those ideas over time. Along the way, conservative legal thinkers could network and strengthen the movement.
Even liberals and leftists are often well represented in Federalist Society events. “You are more likely to convince people of your viewpoint,” one founding document says, “if they feel the other side has been given a fair hearing.” And convincing new converts, rather than sermonizing to the base, was always the goal.
“It wasn’t just a conservative professor coming to preach. It was a conservative or libertarian professor coming to engage a liberal professor, or a socialist professor,” Princeton law professor Robert George, a longtime FedSoc member and leading conservative intellectual, told me. “I thought that was a very, very good thing.” The result, over time, was the total transformation of conservative legal thought into something much more rigorous and acceptable — a narrowly targeted revival. “Transforming the courts,” Teles writes, “required a strategy of elite rather than popular mobilization.”
One of the society’s earliest boosters was Antonin Scalia, who spoke at the inaugural conference and advised the student chapter at the University of Chicago. If originalism were a religious movement, Scalia would be its patron saint. Throughout his judicial tenure, he was a vigorous, outspoken opponent of the “living Constitution” — then the mainstream legal view, which holds that constitutional interpretation can be flexible to evolving standards and norms.
“The Constitution that I interpret and apply,” Scalia once said, with typical flair, “is not living but dead.” He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1986 and became an avatar for the Federalist Society and its views. However, some of his contemporaries did not share his enthusiasm.
John Paul Stevens, appointed by Republican Gerald Ford in 1975, and David Souter, appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1990, went on to become two of the most reliably liberal members of the court. “No more Souters” became a Republican rallying cry. Scalia’s fellow Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy were also less reliably conservative than many expected, leading to one judicial humiliation after another for conservatives.
Among the most memorable came during a landmark 1992 case in which Stevens, Souter, O’Connor and Kennedy all voted to maintain nationwide abortion access in a contested 5-4 decision. But Scalia, who dissented in that case, was the beginning of a new kind of conservative judge that promised to rectify past misfires.
During Trump’s first term, FedSoc membership was basically a prerequisite for Republican nominations to federal courts. He specifically thanked the society for helping him vet his judicial appointments.
“Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court have allowed the conservative legal movement to realize so many of its longtime goals,” says Ilya Shapiro, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute and longtime society member. He cites the overturning of Roe v. Wade; the end of affirmative action; increased Second Amendment protections; and more. “It’s really breathtaking,” he adds. “The fruition, finally, after so many decades of pounding your head against the wall.”
Even Justice Elena Kagan, a Barack Obama appointee and staunch liberal, has quipped, “We’re all originalists now.” She did so in jest, later calling her remark “that stupid sound bite that has been hanging over my head.” She meant that the framers understood the Constitution as something that should change over time as views change, which in her view is a truer form of originalism.
But the incorrect reading hints at a bigger truth: Originalist interpretation is basically a requirement for today’s federal courts. And Americans largely have the Federalist Society to thank for that — along with the new battleground that has come with it. “The society’s activities have injected competition into the legal profession,” Teles writes in his conclusion about FedSoc, “but not, at least for now, a new establishment.”
Seventeen years later, liberal legal theories still dominate law schools, but the courts have been conquered at almost every level — and certainly at the highest level. Roe v. Wade, that pillar of conservative opposition for decades, has fallen. If we’re not living in a new establishment, we’ve at least entered a new legal era. One where FedSoc has to start playing some defense. One where it must evolve.
“I think that the Federalist Society has been at a crossroads for some time,” says David Lat, a legal journalist and longtime society observer who authors a Substack called Original Jurisdiction. “Roe v. Wade was a very unifying force for the conservative legal movement. But once that goal was achieved, now people need to figure out, ‘Where do we go next?’”
Generational conflict
The Federalist Society’s founding president, Eugene B. Meyer, recently stepped down after 42 years. His 44-year-old replacement, Sheldon Gilbert, is much younger, and purposely so. A Latter-day Saint with roots in Idaho and Utah, Gilbert is known for his disarming charm across ideological lines and his love of Olive Garden; a custom-made sign in his office declares, “Limited government. Unlimited breadsticks.” (Through a spokesman, Gilbert declined an interview request.)
Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s board of directors co-chair currently in Trump’s crosshairs, explained that Gilbert’s task will be to navigate “the generational change the society is poised to begin while preserving the society’s core assets and commitments.” The question, in the political era of Trump, is whether this new era for the conservative legal movement can actually do both.
Trump’s fallout with FedSoc goes back to January 6, 2021, when a Federalist Society practice group leader and law professor named John Eastman implored “stop the steal” supporters to lean on Mike Pence to refuse electoral certification. “Anybody who is not willing to stand up and do it does not deserve to be in the office,” he said of Pence. “It is that simple.”
It was not that simple to some fellow members. Among them was Jeremy Rosen, a former Trump judicial nominee and former president of the society’s Los Angeles chapter, who sent an email to the organization’s leaders two days after January 6, asking for big changes.
“I think that the Federalist Society must take a stand to remove anyone from leadership and to take away the legitimacy of our public forums to anyone who participated in this attack on the rule of law and our Constitution,” he wrote, clearly referring to Eastman. “If we cannot take that stand, then what have we been fighting for all of these years?”
Over the next four years, Trump’s many appeals to the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court to grant him electoral relief went nowhere. Privately (and on Truth Social) he has expressed frustration that judges appointed by Republican presidents, and those he appointed himself, did not rule in a way that benefited him. His surrogates have, at times, been more blunt.
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, told The New York Times in 2023. He argued that elite conservative lawyers refused to step up when it mattered most, and that Trump 2.0 will not make the mistake of partnering with them again.
With the Republican Party more broadly moving in that direction — one that prioritizes action and advocacy over debate and restraint — the Federalist Society can either stick to what’s worked in the past and hope it returns to favor, or it can get on board for what Trump’s allies see as the future of the movement.
“I think one of the challenges for the leadership of the Federalist Society is, does it continue to maintain the big-tent philosophy?” says University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell, who advises the school’s Federalist Society student chapter. “I think it would be unfortunate if there was a litmus test where you’ve got to wear a MAGA hat to be in the Federalist Society” — or vice versa. What’s made FedSoc special — and effective — for so long, he argues, is its willingness to challenge and be challenged.
Rosen, who has been involved with the society for 25 years, agrees. “We don’t need another advocacy group. We need the Federalist Society to promote debate and discussion including the wide range of conservative and libertarian legal thought,” he told me in an email. “And we need to empower people to reach their own conclusions on the difficult issues facing our nation.”
One of the challenges facing the Federalist Society is how to mediate generational change. An animating concern of its founding generation was the threat of judicial activism and the rise of an unelected administrative state.
And with each wave of new law students come fresh ideas about about what should animate the future of conservative legal thought, adds Michael Fragoso, a FedSoc member and former chief counsel to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Such debates are often fruitful, Fragoso explains, pointing to the Chevron doctrine, a longtime shibboleth among conservative attorneys.
The Reagan-era Chevron doctrine — which directed courts to defer to executive agencies in interpreting ambiguous statutes — was seen by conservatives at the time as a necessary check on liberal judges. But, over time, many conservative lawyers inside FedSoc came to see Chevron as a double-edged sword. By empowering the executive branch, Chevron also enabled sprawling regulatory regimes that often advanced progressive agendas. What began as a conservative innovation ended up expanding the power of the administrative state — exactly the outcome conservatives would have hoped to avoid. The Supreme Court overturned the doctrine last year.
Cases like Chevron, or other battles that preoccupied earlier generations, feel increasingly abstract. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. Conservative legal minds dominate the federal judiciary. “We’re not the minority anymore,” says society member Oramel H. Skinner, a former solicitor general of Arizona.
For law students and young attorneys — the lifeblood of the Federalist Society — the front lines have shifted. The concerns aren’t confined to courts but extend to the culture at law firms, universities, tech companies and corporate boardrooms where they believe ideological conformity and DEI mandates have chilled speech and squeezed out conservative thought.
In that context, Trump’s posture toward elite institutions often resonates, even if debates continue over tactics. His second-term executive orders have taken aim at what some conservatives see as progressive bias in Big Law, for example, leading to settlements in which firms pledged to make their pro bono work more bipartisan.
Young lawyers in the Society see that as a win, says Skinner. They believe conservatives can use the law to push back against the cultural orthodoxies of corporate America — and they’re interested in how legal power can be leveraged not just in courtrooms, but across institutional life.
“The Federalist Society isn’t a monkhood or self-propagating feudal barons,” Skinner says. “It’s a place where each generation of conservative lawyers gather to refine their thinking about the most pressing legal questions of the day.”
This generational shift — from more procedurally focused conservatism of the past to the institutional questions of the present — may define the Society’s future. For FedSoc’s founders, success meant reining in judicial activism. But for the next generation, it may mean something more ambitious.
Mounting criticism
The Federalist Society has faced frequent questions from its political rivals. Critics on the left have consistently accused its originalist underpinnings of providing convenient cover for conservative causes to prevail in court.
When the Supreme Court’s originalist majority debated whether the president should be granted very broad powers to avoid criminal prosecution under the banner of presidential immunity in July 2024, the liberal dissent spelled out this line of thinking. “The majority thinks he should,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the president above the law.”
Josh Blackman, a law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, sums up the prevailing criticism of the Federalist Society in particular this way: “Critics on the left,” he wrote in December, “see FedSoc as a force of evil.”
That’s not new. But what is are strains of criticism toward the Federalist Society coming from multiple fronts within the conservative movement.
Starting with anti-Trump conservatives, who tend to agree with Sotomayor’s line of thinking, including on the presidential immunity ruling in particular. “At this point, at this Supreme Court, originalism is a dead letter, to be resurrected and employed only when it suits the court’s purposes,” Michael Luttig, a former judge appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush, told NBC News following that ruling. But their problems with the court’s selective application of originalism — and with the Federalist Society — run deeper.
In an op-ed published by The New York Times in November 2023, Luttig joined Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia, and George Conway, a onetime Republican operative who has dedicated most of his recent career to opposing Trump, in calling out the Federalist Society directly. FedSoc, they wrote, served a “principled role” by connecting young conservative lawyers and advancing conservative legal scholarship.
“But the Federalist Society has conspicuously declined to speak out against the constitutional and other legal excesses of Mr. Trump and his administration,” they continued. Especially regarding Trump’s claims of election fraud. “You have some members or former members of the society who believe that Trump is a big threat to the rule of law, and they would like the Federalist Society to take a more vigorous stance on that,” says Lat, the legal journalist.
Yet a different strain of criticism, coming from the right’s most pro-Trump factions, allege almost the exact opposite problem: The Federalist Society and its members didn’t go far enough to defend Trump’s election claims, among other policy proposals. Now is a time to get on board with supporting the future, they argue, rather than falling back on debate, deliberation and adherence to an originalist bent.
In the same New York Times piece in which Vought accused the society of not knowing “what time it is,” reporters suggested that following “the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” the Federalist Society “became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.”
This faction “believes that the Federalist Society is too establishment. It’s not populist enough. It doesn’t reflect the will of the voters who voted Trump back into office,” Lat told me. “Those are the warring camps. And so the Federalist Society faces a challenge.”
Blackman, who was recently appointed by Trump to the newly established Religious Liberty Commission’s advisory board, has argued that the Federalist Society’s long record of favoring moderation and restraint should be questioned.
“This jurisprudence was a natural choice when originalism and conservatism were minority viewpoints on the Supreme Court,” he wrote. “But now, and for the foreseeable future, the roles have reversed. Judges with courage have more cachet than those seeking passive restraint.” He quoted one judge who said that today, the society’s opponents aren’t interested in debate. “It’s a war,” the judge said.
“And if it is a war,” argued Blackman, “the battle plans of days gone by may no longer work.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that originalism no longer works, though it could be threatened under the new paradigm. “If you’ve got results-oriented people — that is, people who don’t really care what the law is; they just want a certain result — you can abuse any theory,” George, the Princeton professor, told me. “But I think the answer to bad originalism is good originalism. … Any judge worth his salt should be able to point to some cases where, ‘Gee, I wish that the law were different. I wish I didn’t have to rule this way. But darn it, it’s what the law is, and my job is not to make policy.’”
That view helps counter critics who claim the Federalist Society is a laundering operation for sneaking conservative policy into law through the courts. But who really are the “results-oriented people” in today’s courts?
Trump’s opponents are unequivocal. “The legal landscape has deteriorated to a degree we failed to imagine,” Luttig, Comstock and Conway argued, “with Mr. Trump and his allies explicitly threatening to upend fundamental tenets of the American constitutional system.” From this side of conservatism (and from the left) comes the thinking that it is Trump who will bend the rule of law to his will and his purposes, originalism be darned.
But other conservative thinkers suggest the true problem is actually the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, which has strayed from its originalist mission under Chief Justice John Roberts. “As Roberts continues to lecture Trump about weakening the rule of law,” Blackman argued in May, “the chief should realize he shares in the blame.”
It is Roberts, Blackman continued, who has politicized the judiciary to the point that trust in the courts has reached an all-time low. “The greatest check on the courts can only be the widely held belief that the court is not ruling based on politics,” he wrote. The court needs to recommit to originalist principles, this thinking goes, rather than compromise for its own sake. “If people believe the judiciary is simply a mediator that weighs political compromise, then the courts cannot long endure.”
So how does the Federalist Society itself fit into all this? Shapiro, the Manhattan Institute Scholar, believes that to implicate FedSoc as either too unwilling to condemn Trump or too unwilling to support him fundamentally misunderstands the organization’s core function.
“It would be a mistake for FedSoc to get into advocacy and activism. There are plenty of those kinds of organizations that do that work,” he told me. “FedSoc facilitates exchanges of ideas, professional development, things like that. And it’s very good at that, and it should continue doing that.” It’s still a mission that’s working; the proof, he adds, is in the nominations.
Despite the president’s recent complaints about the Federalist Society, his first five judicial appointees in his second term all have FedSoc ties. They might fit a different profile than past nominees, chosen more for their willingness to fight and show backbone than for originalist philosophy and scholarship, but their enduring affiliations with the society illustrate how deep its roots run in different factions of the conservative legal movement.
“I doubt they’re going to be looking for people who are not members of the Federalist Society,” Shapiro added, “because I think to this day, not being a member of FedSoc is a bit of a red flag.” He’s not opposed to the society’s evolution; frontiers like an enhanced digital media presence, for example, still need to be conquered.
But Shapiro’s idea of evolution is about image rather than mission. And right now, some other conservatives are concerned about the mission itself. “I worry that the celebrated approach that worked to climb the sunrise side of the mountain may lead to (the Federalist Society’s) decline on the other side,” Blackman wrote. Now, rather, is a time for change and reinvention.
“What is that new approach? I do not know,” he continued. “However, maintaining the status quo is not sustainable.”
A fork in the road
From a spread of pastries, parfaits and drums of Chobani, a group of chitchatting men and women in coats trickled through gilded doorframes into the grand ballroom of The Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., just four blocks from Lafayette Square and the White House. They’d come in early May 2025 for the Federalist Society’s 13th annual “Executive Branch Review Conference” — an ideal barometer to assess where the organization’s “status quo” stands amid a string of discussions on presidential power.
A wide-shouldered man in a blue suit stepped to the lectern to get things started. “No doubt, since January, there has been much to discuss each day — often several times a day,” he said, to a chuckle from the crowd, “about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake the modern executive branch and the administrative state.” From there, the event included spirited, contentious, sincere discussions on issues from injunctions to removal powers to DOGE, with MAGA and anti-Trump factions represented throughout.
During the DOGE panel, for example, former Bush official Kristine Simmons argued that as far as she could see, the department’s approach was wasteful, untargeted and unlikely to actually save any money. She was supportive of hard-working civil servants, and she looked forward to receiving some enlightenment by the rest of the panel as to why she was wrong. Hans von Spakovsky seemed pleased to oblige.
A senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the Project 2025 section about election reform, von Spakovsky favored DOGE’s chainsaw approach outright, and he made his case for it with language that sounded familiar to anyone fluent in MAGA-speak. He referenced “The Swamp” and the need to drain it multiple times; cited The New York Times from “back when it was a real newspaper and not a propaganda broadsheet”; and spoke of the abominable bureaucrats who “infest” the federal government. Both bore impressive Republican credentials, yet they found themselves very far apart.
“I think it would be unfortunate if there was a litmus test where you’ve got to wear a MAGA hat to be in the Federalist Society” — or vice versa.
The day’s discussions built, however, to a keynote address by Harmeet Dhillon. She was recently confirmed to lead the Justice Department’s office of civil rights. A report in The Wall Street Journal ranks her “among Trump’s staunchest legal allies,” in significant part because of her efforts to assist the president’s election challenges.
Taking the stage wearing a lime-green blazer, she outlined her priorities — combatting antisemitism; limiting transgender participation in sports; fighting against wokeness and for religious liberty — with impressive precision and enthusiasm. Several folks seated near me muttered about how impressive she sounded. But her speech made it very clear why The Wall Street Journal reported “widespread agreement that (her approach) is unconventional.”
Dhillon, taking cues from Trump’s own approach, has sought to pull every lever at her disposal to advance the president’s goals. She said as much in an early memo to staff. “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires dedication of the section’s resources, actions, attention, and energy to the priorities and objectives of the President,” she wrote. Her speaking at a Federalist Society gathering, then, illustrates the group’s inherent tensions.
It’s a debate society. A networking club, first and foremost, yes. But it isn’t just that, and never has been. It’s a reflection and incubator of conservative culture more broadly. And given FedSoc’s recent fracture with the Trump administration, Dhillon’s keynote could suggest the potential for a reconciliation.
“It does reflect the fact that the society continues to be very concerned about access. They want to still have a seat at the table,” Lat says. “So it is probably smart to have Harmeet Dhillon there. And the fact that she accepted the invite is good (for the Federalist Society), because maybe there’s some other speakers in the Trump administration who would not have.”
The address itself explained her priorities with the Justice Department, but it was mainly a recruiting pitch. “We’re at a ‘fork in the road’ in the conservative movement,” she told the crowd at The Mayflower, borrowing a preferred phrase from DOGE.
She tried selling young Federalist Society members on forgoing the path of least resistance — prestigious clerkships and major firms and second homes (even though she has a second home, she joked, so no shame in that) — in favor of service to upholding conservative principles in the law and “defend(ing) the most vulnerable in our nation.” She charted a future where the “fork in the road” is a choice between the way things have been and a new, mission-driven era.
At the conclusion of her speech, Dhillon praised Trump for “restoring balance” to civil rights enforcement. It’s a thrilling time, she said, to be working for the cause of conservative legal goals. “And,” she added, “we’re just getting started.” The crowd offered a rousing ovation.
This story will appear in the July/August 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.